Posted
by
timothy
on Wednesday August 27, 2008 @08:25AM
from the but-ram-doubler-is-old-news dept.

wakaramon writes with a piece from IEEE Spectrum about an experimental approach to squeezing more usable storage out of a device's existing RAM; the researchers were using a Linux-based PDA as their testbed, and claim that their software "effectively gives an embedded system more than twice the memory it had originally — essentially for free." "Although the price of RAM has plummeted fast, the need for memory has expanded faster still. But if you could use data-compression software to control the way embedded systems store information in RAM, and do it in a way that didn't sap performance appreciably, the payoff would be enormous."

Tech Support: "How much RAM do you have in the computer?"Customer: "32 megs."Tech Support: "Are you using any RAM doubling software?"Customer: "Yes."Tech Support: "So you have 16 megs of actual, physical RAM?"Customer: "No. I have 8 megs. I installed [a RAM expanding product], and that gave me 16. I liked it so much I went out and got [another RAM expanding product]. So now I have 32."